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The Ghost Busters Are Back
Well, at least a pretty keen demo showing a potential Ghost Busters game is out there, anyway.
This could be fake or a joke, I don't know. But it looks more like a demo concept for a Ghost Buster game. Is it real? We'll have to make some calls and see. Check this site, where four videos show off the concept video.
What do you think? Is it real or fake?
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Thursday, January 11, 2007 |
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2007: Micrososft's Best Line-up Ever
While it's true that 2006 was decent for Xbox 360, capped by the non-ending hype for Gears of War, a title that is just about to reach the 3 million units sold mark, Microsoft's real big real will be 2007. I predict and will put down money that this will be an amazing year of Microsoft; the kind of season it's never had before. In the the game industry, Microsoft is coming of age, and 2007 is its year. Not a huge prediction, but a prediction, nonetheless.
If it was just Halo 3 alone, that would be enough. Halo is so freaking big, so popular, and so much more massive in its wieldy haze of glory that it could carry 2007 if it had to, the way that Zelda carries Nintendo, or GT or God of War carried Sony. Sorry, if that sounds a little gushy. The sad truth is Halo is too big, kind of like Mortal Kombat was in the mid-'90s; you know, two movies, a skating/dance circus of some sort; more kids knowing about Mortal Kombat than Abe Lincoln. Crazy stuff, I tell you. If Too Human is half way decent, if Crackdown is average, then good, we'll have more original, exclusive titles for Xbox 360. But then there is Forza 2, Mass Effect, Shadow Run and Project Gotham Racing 4 -- all coming this year, all exclusive, all with the massive potential to be great. That's just first- and second-party games alone -- all published by Microsoft.
Now let's scan through the third-party list. Ah, I see Virtua Fighter 5, The Darkness, BioShock, Def Jam Icon, Eternal Sonata, and who knows, perhaps some other big-time Namco games that once been sole Sony territory and that will soon be revealed for multiple systems. I can't say anything official, but keep your eye on Namco in 2007. My lips are sealed for now; but just you wait. 
Now I must stop a second to mention BioShock. Did you see the screenshots revealed in December? If not, check them out. Then there is Ubisoft, which will give us potentially huge games, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and Assassin's Creed among them. Oh yeah, and if getting Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on XBLA isn't cool enough, well, damn you and may you drown in the river Styx.
Those games alone, including the cross-console games (The Darkness, VF5, Def Jam Icon, GRAW 2) make this year freakin' unstoppable. Then, to cap it all off, there is Grand Theft Auto IV. Holy F*&^ing Sh*t. Have you saved up your money yet? Better save up at least $800, cause that at least covers eight must-have games, plus who knows what else is coming? Ubisoft has at least one or two surprises up its sleeve.
OK, OK, this just sounds like hype. I admit it; I'm giddy about this year's line-up. But in all honesty, what is not to like? There are at least five, if not 10 great games staring you in the face, many of them exclusive to Xbox 360. Even if you wiped all of this happiness, this joy, away, and coldly examined the games with indifference, you'd be hard-pressed to disagree. Even if you despise the Xbox 360 and everything Microsoft stands for, you can't honestly tell me that the combination of exclusives, Halo 3, Mass Effect, Forza 2, and BioShock (on PC, but not PS3) isn't a convincing lineup the likes of which Microsoft has never had before.
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Tuesday, January 02, 2007 |
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The Top Five Albums and No Rap
I looked over my CD collection today and realized how much incredible music I've gathered, but the more incredible thing is how much music I don't have. I dig into the indy scene and I tend to like punk and punk variations as well as blues-related music, but I have missed out on so much rap and hip-hop that I hardly know where to begin. Would anyone recommend a top 10 best rap/hip-hop collection for someone who really wants to hear great stuff but doesn't know where to start? (That's me.) By the way, I do own a few good ones, I think. I own De La Soul's first album, Queen Latifa's Nature of a Sista and All Hail the Queen, Public Enemy's All Hail the Queen, Run DMC's Greatest Hits, and all of the Beastie Boys albums.
By the way, I'm not sure if 2006 was a good, great, or horrible year for music on the whole, but I bought a few excellent new albums and some fantastic old ones too.
Wolfmother
Yes, like so many recent bands, Wolfmother sounds familiar. They also sound good. With influences from Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Ozzy Orborne among others, their music is hard, sharp, even progressive to a degree. The lead singer wields a sometimes harsh and grating voice, but he's different because he's a talented singer with an inherently unusual voice. His natural voice immediately removes him from gifted musician singers who have learned to sing (Jack White) and puts him in the Robert Plant range. I can't say I love his voice, but I like the music and the singing as a whole. Their first album has amazing range. The songs are all over the place, and I hope they are able to further meld their influences into something even more original.
Yeah Yeah Yeah's Show Your Bones
This album rips. It is the band's first complete album in the sense that it feels like it was composed in the studio and feels both emotionally and sonically connected. I don't know whether it was or not (studio composed), but it feels whole and complete unlike their other singles and compilations, which I also own and love. Many "purists" might disagree on the first premise, since the Yeah Yeah Yeah's music is best heard live. It is best heard live, but this album songs stunning recorded, which show the band's growth into more than just a tour band. It contains so many well written songs. Karen O's song writing (I assume she's the song writer) perfectly blends terse phrasing and her rough-rider personality into heart-wrenching, boot-stomping, door-busting song. She has grown into an even more powerful singer on Show Your Bones. She turns simple songs with few words into stunning, energetic fireballs of raw emotion. She ties each song together with sighs, lingering drawls, and perfectly timed screams and turns this relatively simple punk music into great, deep, long-lasting punk music. I've listened to this all year -- dozens and dozens of times -- and I'm still listening to it with awe.
8-Bit Weapon's 8-Bit Weapon
These crazy mother-fuckers. These two geeky, video-game loving musicians are really indy. The first time I saw them was when a friend of mine, Jack, turned me on at last year's IGN Live event. I then later bought their album, designed to look like a PC floppy disc from the '80s. Their influences spring from '70s and '80s German bands (like Kraftwerk), videogame music and Devo to name a few core influences, but their sound is original, innovative, and the first time I heard it, stunning. Just think what would happen if a band distilled all the catchy videogame themes, songs, and sound effects and injected them into dozens and dozens of Devo-Kraftwerk music. Catchy videogame themes from Contra, Super Mario, and even Game Boy and Super NEs sounds have been used to create these crazy beats. The band doesn't just sample the music, however. It wires game Boys and other games systems so that they original programmed music is reprogammed and mapped to keyboards so it can be called up any any time. To watch this duo play (a guy singer/keyboardist and a girl drummer) is amazing. Do yourself a favor and listen to them.
The Flaming Lips's War of the Mystics
I love the Flaming Lips because they don't give a fuck. Their music is freaky, messed-up, and newly psychedelic in all the right ways. I once bought an album of theirs and it sucked royally. The do super-sonic messed-up noise-making things, and half the time it works. The other times…
What really hooked me was Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, and I know I'm among many others who heard this album for the first time and realized how great the band was. Of course, I have come into Flaming Lips lifespan a little late because, obviously, they have been creating music long before this album, but to me that was their first great album. I know this because I have listened to other albums of theirs, and they're just not as good in my humble opinion. They're not as listenable. War of the Mystics is a close thematic continuation of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, but perhaps produced at even higher levels of quality and musically with more homages to progressive '70s music and shiny '80s soul from the '80s. Just like all Flaming Lips albums this one has moments that just hurt or are silly or aren't catchy, but loud, harsh and gnarly. But that's just them.
Bob Dylan's No Direction Home: The Soundtrack (The Bootleg Series Vol. 7)
This is a fantastic narrative that follows Dylan from his early days in 1959 (When I Got Troubles) where he was just starting to imitate and mimic Woody Guthrie to his breakthrough folks songs Blowing in the Wind and Chimes to Freedom to his so-called betrayal of the folkies with Maggie's Farm and Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat. It's the soundtrack from the Martin Scorsese documentary, Bob Dylan No Direction Home: The Soundtrack, so you won't necessary hear any new music, just some previously unheard versions of older songs.
But I gotta tell you, to hear Bob Dylan sing Masters of War live and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall live gave me shivers, and still does each time I hear it. Dylan evolved from his Guthrie stage into a bard poet with a sharp, clear, and angry look on the world and everything he said was exactly what was felt and though by some many others, but nobody put it together like he did, in poetry, in song, with wide-eyed, unapologetic anger. Wow.
Just listen to A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. It's amazing. It's raw, painful, beautiful, and angry, politic dissent. Perhaps an even better thing to do is to rent the video and watch this documentary. It's filled with hours of live footage captured by a director during the early '60s tour in England where people booed and screamed at Dylan after his transition from folk music to rock. It's got footage from the Newport Folk Festival, too, where Michael Bloomfield's electric guitar shocked people, as well as footage from Washington DC, Carnegie Hall and more. The amazing thing is the footage was never used and so Scorsese was able to weave it into his own documentary. It's a must-watch video. Even if you don't like Dylan, it's an amazing period of time captured on film.
Stadium Arcrapidum
The worst Album I bought in 2006 was the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium. I have been a fan of the Peppers since 1984, when I regularly saw them play in LA. I saw them play with Run DMC and Fishbone in 1985 and I saw them play again and again (my favorite concert was when they played the songs from The Uplift Mofo Party Plan when they appeared in night-glow body paint under black lights), until the 1990s when they finally became a mass audience band thanks to Mother's Milk and Blood Sugar Sex Magik, the latter an album that many fans hated but I liked. Stadium Arcadium is the outgrowth of the crooning ballad, Under the Bridge in all of the worst ways. It's a double album that ditches the original punk-rap roots of the Chili Peppers and gives us schmaltzy, FM-friendly rock, and the most heart-breakingly bad milque-toast crap I've ever heard from this once-great band. Shockingly, it's been embraced with open arms. I personally bought the album because the single wasn't bad, but the rest of the album is far worse. I still have not listened to the second disc. The first one was so depressing I couldn't bare it. Anyway, enough of that. Once great band that now sucks rocks. Who'd a thunk it?
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Sunday, December 31, 2006 |
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New Year
A happy one to all!
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Sunday, December 31, 2006 |
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Guitar Hero and Cornish Game Hens
Guitar Hero II
Guitar Hero II hates me. Why oh why can't I hit the orange keys? My fingers just do not comply. I can shred the game in medium. It's totally fun in medium. It brings me tremendous pleasure in medium. Then, when I switch over to hard, wham. F'ed, big time. WHat do I predict for me in hard mode? Just like Mr. T said, "PAIN."
The other funny thing about Guitar Hero II is that it's the only videogame I have played at any length since vacation started. I mean it. I wanted to finish Rainbow Six, battle endlessly with Jon Miller online in Battlestations: Midway -- a clunky but entertaining WWII naval RTS for the PC and Xbox 360 -- and play like four other games. Instead? I play Guitar Hero II over and over again. I love that game. One big reason is that I can play for five minutes or 30 minutes, have a great time, and rush back to feed my screaming kid without feeling like I'm missing some storyline or action sequence. Other than GHII, I am on videogame hiatus and loving it. See what this job does to you? It makes you take big long breaks from videogames. I think I'm regenerating brain cells I lost while doing my job, and hey! It feels great.
Cooking
I got this cook book for Christmas, Biba's Italy, and it's got a few really recipes in it. One of them I cooked tonight, Polla alla Diavola, aka, Spicy Baby Chicken "Devil Style." So easy, and if you can use a grill, it's killer. Mix 1/3 cup olive oil with one whole lemon, a table spoon of red pepper flakes and another tablespoon of salt. Remove the back bone from three Cornish Game Hens, spread the bird out flat, and then pound it with a roller or your hands. Cover the chicken with the mixture, cover and set aside for 30 minutes. Then grill it for 15 minutes on each side. I made this, with grilled Yukon potatoes and a celery root and apple salad with Dijon mustard dressing, and man it was good. Of course, the Boddington's draught helped too, heh. But I grilled it just right: the bird was darkened on the outside and perfectly juicy inside. I'm still reeling in its goodness. My wife is a professional cook and she loved it. When she loves something I cook, I know I have done good.
The author, an American-Italian woman who runs a restaurant in Sacramento, Ca., and who has written five or so Italian Cookbooks, does something really strange with 98% of her recipes. Nearly every single recipe in her book uses prosciutto or parma ham. And I don't mean half her recipes. Whether she's talking about ragu or stews or pasta, it's got prosciutto in it. This Italian meat is super tasty, high fat, and expensive. It's great, but does it have to be in everything? The recipes she's gathered for this book were all found from restaurants in Italy as she traveled from the Southern to the Northern tip, researching for this book. I think she added a little bit to each recipe, and in this case, I know she added prosciutto to far too many. She uses it like salt or onions, as a favor agent. Anyway, with this book I had to pick and choose recipes so as not to kill myself with prosciutto.
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